Development Stage – Final Year Project

Posted on February 10, 2016 at 2:54 pm.

After spending 2-3 weeks on writing up the platform’s user requirements and designing the architecture, I decided it is high time to start developing something! I will focus in the first month on making sure the video player implements the dash.js library very well, adaptive streaming is applied correctly in conjunction with Amazon Web Services – S3 and Cloudfront as CDN. In March I’ll look into applying some style to the website and its native features to enable students to sign up, browse and join courses.

In regards to AWS, I am using the 12-month free trial for all services, which includes 5 GB of Standard Storage, 20,000 GET requests and 2,000 PUT requests on S3, as well as 50GB of Data Transfer out and 2 million HTTP/HTTPS requests for Cloundfront. This is more than enough for my project’s development and testing stage and I am super happy I can benefit from this types of services at no cost. I have set up a billing alert, just in case.

AWS also makes it so easy to set up everything. They have an incredibly comprehensive documentation and they’re very well integrated with other online services. For instance, I am using Bitcodin to encode and segment my video files, in order to be usable in the DASH context. They have a very nice UI which makes it so easy to encode video files and offers the chance to either download everything as a .zip file or output it directly in your Amazon’s S3 bucket.

Out of the 3 profiles: FullHD- 1080p, HD – 720p and SD-480p, I chose the 720p version. Mainly because I want to optimise as much as possible the streaming process on mobile devices that generally do not support Full HD resolutions. As the content is not very rich as well, an upper limit of HD-720p would suffice in terms of user experience for an education platform.